How to implement the classic "sticky footer" with angular-material?

I recognize that the Angular Material implementation is a work in progress, but I've spent some time this morning trying to get familiar with it. However, I'm really struggling to get the concepts shown in the demos to work in a stand alone site.

It seems that when the directives like

<md-toolbar>

and

<md-content>

are used in containers with fixed heights, then they work great. I'm struggling with how to throw them inside a

I've tried many variations, but here's one example that doesn't work when the content is removed from the DOM. When the content is there it grows beyond the viewport and the footer is placed afterwards like you'd expect. In the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox this example keeps the footer at the bottom when the content is removed, but in IE this just doesn't work at all. In IE the footer floats just below the header regardless of whether the main content is shown or not.